Every year, the ratio of boys in college to girls has fallen steadily. Last year, girls comprised 80 percent of the students graduating with honors from two and four year colleges nationwide.
Meanwhile, near-epidemic rates of eating disorders, cyber-bullying and anxiety show that over-achieving girls find their success increasingly difficult to enjoy.
On November 16, more than 200 Sonoma area parents and local educators convened at Presentation School to hear best-selling author, MD and PhD Leonard Sax speak about the underlying issues behind these startling statistics.
As a family physician and psychologist, Sax has been studying gender differences for almost 20 years. His first best-selling book, “Why Gender Matters” was published in 1995 and it addressed findings in the emerging science of sex differences.
In 2009, he followed up with: “Boy’s Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys.” Earlier, this year, he released the best-seller “Girl’s On the Edge,” an examination of the increasing number of teenage girls who look great and act cheerful, but for whom pressure and obsessions have led them to the brink of a collapse, unsure of who they are or what they want.
Armed with a great deal of scholarly research and statistics, Dr. Sax painted a fairly grim picture of a current generation of American boys who are less resilient and less ambitious than their fathers. “Too many boys today think it is uncool to work hard for good grades, and the video games have shifted their motivation away from the real world to the virtual world,” Sax said.
He begs parents of teenage boys to limit their access to games like “Grand Theft Auto” and “Call of Duty” and to hesitate before medicating their sons for ADD and ADHD.
While he believes in the validity of these afflictions, he cited research proving that some medications like Adderall and Ritalin have lasting negative side affects on the specific area of the brain that controls motivation. His recommendations for teenage boys are more time unplugged and outdoors, more time with male role models and exposure to teachers who understand how to engage boys and the different ways that boys learn versus girls.
“With popular culture providing so few positive male role models,” he said, “today’s boys actually need to be taught what it means to be a man and to be provided with concrete examples of hardworking, caring knowledgeable men.”
Dr. Sax is also concerned about how different life is today for teenage girls than it was even 20 years ago. The subtitle of his book about girls is “The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls — sexual identity, obsessions, environmental toxins and the cyberbubble.”
Stated Sax, “The crucial adolescent self-reflection and discovery that once took place during conversations with close friends and in diaries, doesn’t happen on Facebook where girls are instead creating completely false versions of their persona.”
Girls are no longer forced to say something cruel out loud and take responsibility for it, they can be cruel anonymously, he said. Girls turn for advice exclusively to other teenage girls who are uniquely unqualified to counsel them
Sax said environmental toxins in our food and drink are causing more and more girls to reach puberty far sooner than they are equipped to handle the change.
While the findings he quoted are grim and compelling, he again offered some solutions including more sleep, limits on evening texting, more time with members of their community — and a greater dose of what boys are so good at — learning how to relax and enjoy themselves and appreciate their virtues.
Local Educational Consultant and Learning Specialist Lorin Loughlin was in the audience and her reaction to his theories and the supporting data provided was largely positive, “Dr. Sax’s discussion of gender differences in boy and girls and the reality of the ‘world they live in’ was thought provoking. It gave me perspective on how much a child’s reality differs from that in which their parents grew up.”
Loughlin said that the negative pressures that technology places on our children is not to be ignored. “We, as parents and educators, must be informed about the detrimental effect it can have.”
In addition to the free public lecture, Sax conducted two days of professional development with the Presentation faculty on the specifics of how boys and girls learn differently in a school environment.
“The sessions were incredibly valuable for us,” reported school Director Nancy Fischman. “While our teachers were familiar with many of the findings discussed, Dr. Sax provided many concrete and compelling classroom strategies that all teachers can easily implement.”
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